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iQuestions Faculty, Ted Baehr 
 
 
Question: 
 
What are some fun ways that I can help develop my kids media 
discernment? 
 
Answer: 
 
There are a lot of fun things you can with your kids regarding media. 
The fun things you do with your kids regarding media is going to help 
them develop media wisdom, discernment, media and cultural 
knowledge and understanding. 
 
The University of Toronto—now I’m going to take some of the 
negative—said that when children are wired and watching something 
with a lot of violence and they get all excited, when you bring in their 
mother or father, their reaction changes 180 degrees. 
 
Quite often the child will be sitting on the couch watching something 
and you say, “What are you watching?” They turn it off right away, 
because they’re embarrassed by it.  
 
By sitting there with them—they understand—you are helping them 
bring your values into it. They start to incorporate the values.  
 
Stop what you’re watching, if you’re watching a video, and ask them, 
“What happened in this scene? Is this something that you would like to 
see in real life?”  
 
Start asking them the right questions: “Who is the hero? Who is the 
villain? How is business portrayed? How is government portrayed? 
How are Christians portrayed? How are women portrayed?” 
 
 
 
I’ve got to tell you in this vein I’ve been teaching media wisdom since 
1978, when we put together the first course. That was at a public 
school, instead of at University of New York.  
 
And we found out, because we’d send people home to watch television 
and count the number of acts of violence against women, women were 
usually at the receiving end of violence over 60% of the time.  
 
Because it was a public school, you couldn’t say whether this was good 
or bad. I think you’d count the times and you’d say “Aha! Women are 
being abused more often in these movies. What do you think about 
this?”  
 
I think it’s awful, because you don’t want your children to develop the 
scripts of behavior that they think abuse is a good way to act toward 
other people. 
 
We have to be able to ask the judgmental questions—and I know, 
that’s a bad word—that say it’s not good to abuse children. You need 
to be able to not only ask the questions to reveal what’s going on in 
the program, but then you need to be able to ask the wisdom 
questions to say: “Is this good or bad?”  
Baehr -2- 
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